They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

sole and separate use.63 While parents presented their daughters with both enslaved males and females as inheritances upon marriage, they more frequently gave them female slaves. From a logical perspective, their decision to do so might seem motivated by the rationale that enslaved women and girls would be more useful to daughters, who bore the bulk of the domestic responsibilities in and management of their households, and sometimes this was the case. But they also gave enslaved girls and women (especially those of childbearing age) to their daughters, because females possessed the reproductive capacity to add to their daughters’ labor force. Of course, slaveholders in the colonial period did not value enslaved females’ reproduction in the ways that their counterparts would in the nineteenth century. In the colonial period, especially before the abolition of the African slave trade to America in 1808, many slave owners discouraged enslaved women from reproducing. They considered enslaved infants to be time-consuming financial burdens who prevented their mothers from devoting all of their attention to their white households. Slave owners often sold such women simply because they were conceiving and delivering children too frequently. After 1808, however, when slave owners could no longer depend upon a steady supply of newly imported African captives, they had to rely on a domestic supply of enslaved laborers, and they became invested in the “natural” reproduction of the en...